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Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.

I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.



Did you study chemical engineering knowing it's applicability to software engineering?

Your observation is interesting because early ideas in object oriented design were likewise inspired by biological robustness in the face of a non-zero background error rate (see any of Alan Kay's early writings, and his Turing lecture). I wonder if half of a CS degree shouldn't also involve basic chemeng and bioeng.




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